


Who Could Trace the Secret Hand of Providence

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [11]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: (subsumed), Canonical Character Death, Hand & Finger Kink, Kink Shaming, M/M, Recovery, References to Depression, Suicide, World War II, Wrists, touch starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-08 11:37:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12863694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Thomas Nightingale definitely doesn’t have a hand fetish – except for at the times (and with the particular people) when he definitely does.





	Who Could Trace the Secret Hand of Providence

**Author's Note:**

> Oops, I angsted. (And managed to write a fetish fic with no sex in it, what is WRONG with me.) This can be read as part of the [Gentleman's Agreement series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/824562) or mostly on its own!
> 
> Also, a **NOTE:** I recently re-ordered the series to have it be vaguely chronological. Check out the series page for the new list! (The numbers and ordering were a little wonky for a while, but it seems to have sorted itself out for the most part now....)

*

Thomas Nightingale developed an amateur’s fascination with the workings of human hands at a relatively early age.

For many years, he was able to explain it away in purely practical terms. It made sense, after all, as a young magician, to catalogue, to understand, and to try to emulate the movements of one’s instructors and fellows in school when they cast magic: when they flicked their fingers and sent objects flying, or when they clenched them in frustration and left nailmarks in their palms and, across a room, pages came ripping out of an offending textbook that was completely incomprehensible. When were the physical habits of a practitioner clearly in aid of their magic, when were they a hindrance – in the rare moments when he fancied himself an intellectual, as a teenager, Thomas wondered whether this would be his contribution to the history of magic itself. Perhaps, someday, the library of that far-off place he knew existed in London, far from the rude gestures and accusatory points of Casterbrook, would hold a slim volume by that eccentric old bird, Nightingale, who had drawn careful diagrams of the hand positions most conducive to the proper practice of _aer_ and _lux_ for the benefit of future generations.

He never did write that book, but when he did come down to London his soft-edged obsession remained. Though he was no experimenter himself, he enjoyed observing the studied or careless or simply carefree work of so many pairs of hands in the laboratories, the flourishes of those young men who were showing off, the stabbing straightforwardness of old men who had seen it all before and saw no reason for such indulgent flamboyance. And Thomas would keep up his study in the evenings, when it was no longer fire or water or air that was being manipulated, but glasses of port held disinterestedly in palms, cigarettes dangling louchely from fingertips, the stain of tobacco or food on thumbs.

He would never be able to pinpoint, in retrospect, when he first started finding them beautiful. He was far beyond redemption before he knew he had begun.

Being unable or unwilling to even understand what he felt – or even thinking that this was, indeed, something very crucial to him – meant that it was rather a surprise when someone else noticed. Mellenby wasn’t supposed to notice him, after all, because despite Thomas’s skill and the respect it was afforded, he wasn’t one meant to be noticed.

Everything David did was noticeable, indeed impossible to ignore. David’s crazed, brilliant work in the labs, David’s clattering pounding away at a typewriter long into the night and early in the mornings, David’s bright laughter and long telephone calls with the Continent; David’s reputation proceeding him, and strangers thinking they would encounter some nocturnal boffin who was probably destined to be shunted off back to Oxbridge at the earliest opportunity, when he was really holding court in the Folly’s smoking room every evening, tireless, gorgeous, capricious.

David Mellenby’s hands were quite small, very thin, uncommonly strong. Nervous yet purposeful, never a wasted movement, though every twitch of them was quick and swerving, like they didn’t know where to go next because there was too much in the world for them to take.

Thomas knew, but didn’t think much about, the fact that his and David’s friendship was considered strange. Chalk and cheese, he knew some of his colleagues would say; odd, that whenever Nightingale came back from one of his Imperial assignments Mellenby would welcome him back into the Folly with a great stretching grin of conviviality and hurry him away to be lectured about things to do with quantum physics that none of them understood, and Nightingale would just listen, smiling, as though he’d waited all year for it; odd, that Nightingale, who rarely spoke more than a sentence or two put together at a time, would write such long letters, ones which sometimes cost them a full sixpence at the door to receive.

Perhaps some of them suspected. Thomas, surprising himself, found that he rather didn’t care what they thought – not when he was the one who got to sit up late by David’s fireplace, contemplating embers, and be the one sitting there when David, still writing, always writing, always thinking, would reach out sideways and put his left hand in between both of Thomas’s, not particularly caring what Thomas would then do with it.  

“All right,” David would say eventually, dropping his pen and stretching out the cramp in his fingers; “Come here, you great lummox,” he would add, fondly unkind, though Thomas never took offense at it, because he knew very well the differences between them. He knew he was good old Thomas, solid, quiet Thomas, does what he’s told, knows what he’s doing, maybe had an end to his tether but nobody knew what that looked like – compared even to his lean strength, David, fine-boned, high-strung, with a touch of touched genius about him, felt brittle and precious. And so Thomas would clasp David to him, and worship him, and felt lucky to be allowed to do it.

David’s hands, bloodied, scratched, trembling with fatigue and white with cold, pawed at him – tore at him, even, when he tried to let go, when he tried to force David off of him and into the waiting arms inside the last glider, the last escape from Ettersburg. _Get in, you stupid bastard_ , he thought he’d seen David howl (finally wanting him, finally _needing_ him), but he was beyond hearing it, knowing that no, he had to form up the rear guard, he _was_ the rear guard, and that if he didn’t stay the glider would be shot out of the air and David would never get home.

So he’d grabbed for David’s fingers, and pressed the briefest of kisses to them, and turned away, and used his own to set fire to tanks instead.

During the mad retreat, the scramble and monotony of the long walk through the woods, he was held up by the hands of one Frank Caffrey, an enormous para from south London, grinning through the mass of blood that dripped down his face, who told stories to keep them both going – about his dad Frank, and how he had a baby son at home named Frank who was just getting his first tooth, and I dunno, sir, it’s just a bit of tradition – he would cheerfully admit that they’d never had enough imagination to come up with any different names, anyways. They were separated one night as werewolves rushed in on their makeshift camp; in the smoking dawn, with his ribs aching from the bullet that had ricocheted off of them and every limb shaking, Thomas found himself alone, and stumbled on with nothing left but the memory of the heat of Caffrey’s palm, like a brand, on the back of his neck.

After the war, if he thought of anyone’s hands, they were David’s, calm, not a tremor in them, manifesting his sincere belief that he had been abandoned and betrayed, as they meticulously cleaned and loaded the pistol that would kill him. So Thomas stopped thinking of them at all, for a while. He stopped thinking about much of anything, in fact.

Thomas’s own fingers grew thin, as he aged. He hadn’t quite expected that. It felt as though layers of him were peeling away, leaving what stayed behind arthritic and aching. He almost envied Molly’s stasis, the dependable paleness of her face as she placed saucers and cups and plates before him. But when he began experiencing it himself – when, in the Sixties, he woke and held his hands up to the light and wondered why they didn’t hurt anymore – it was by far the most unnerving part of all.

He was slow to come around to the idea of properly investigating the puzzle of his age – nearly fifteen years slow, in fact, and it took Molly’s waging a severe campaign of cooking food so unpalatable that he suspected she were trying to poison him in order to make her point, and for him to finally make his way to the nearby University College Hospital to speak to someone about it. And he also realized only in retrospect that the young Scottish doctor who examined him – Walid, he’d said his name was, which was odd, but far from the oddest thing Nightingale had encountered, so he kept his mouth shut about it – was, in all likelihood, the first person to have touched him in any meaningful sense for close to thirty years.

He almost closed his eyes into the sensation of it. Almost. He was not quite so far gone as that, nor was he going to forget eighty years of appallingly British reticence because of one pair of careful, competent hands skimming his ribcage and palpating his scar tissue, gently directing his movement, firm at the edges of his chin or jaw.

“This chart says you were born in 1900,” Walid said, the broad Highland accent bringing Thomas abruptly out of his thoughts. “I assume that’s incorrect – shouldn’t it be 1935 or so?”

“No,” he admitted, and Walid swore, and stared at him, and when the doctor stepped briefly out of the room to fetch some other piece of equipment, Thomas pulled his coat back on and, in as dignified a manner as he could manage, scarpered.

He got used to it faster than he would have expected, as Walid wheedled his way into the Folly over the next month – he got used again to shaking someone’s hand in greeting, to taking pleasure in being warmer than one’s fellow man and the difference in temperature between skin that had sat inside all day, and that of someone coming in from the cold. When he cast a supervisory eye over Walid as he started to read his way through the mundane library in the winter evenings, the similarity of the scene to those before the war, watching David, momentarily startled him – the brilliant young man at work while he looked on, the scribbling of the pen, the frown of concentration as pages were turned.

But it was different, of course, and he remembered that every time Walid glanced up and caught him looking, and smiled; at how he was just as concerned with Thomas’s participation in his magical education as he was himself, at how he was willing to talk, and be visibly baffled and perplexed by magic in Thomas’s presence, and sat with legs outstretched in front of the fire while he fell asleep, worn down by the seasonal demands of the hospital, still nursing the warmth of his half-empty mug of tea between his palms.

Abdul’s hands were new to him, and took much observing; Thomas tried not to evoke comparison, but it was difficult not to as the 80s wore on. Larger hands than David’s, he remembered thinking. Slightly blunter, too, but no less talented. More cautious, but also provoking more confidence. Practiced, as his own were, but not with thin air and formae and theory – rather with objects (Thomas was justified in staring, rather a lot, when, in the mid-80s, Walid showed up with a portable computing device – ‘laptop,’ what sort of word was that, anyway – and learned a new way of watching hands type), with scalpels and microscopes and the sharp edges of pages in his endless medical journals, oft-accompanied by papercuts and gloves and the sticky shine of someone else’s blood. Thomas watched him pull on layers of latex, and then of Kevlar, and then of chainmail – blood-borne pathogens were no laughing matter, as he knew Abdul had learned all too well in the Soho of the late 80s and early 90s – and take men apart in the mortuary, all efficient dignity, and wondered despite himself what it would feel like to be under those hands’ care.

Gentle, he decided, though not permissive. Dedicated. Certain.

He found out what it was really like in 1990, and was proven – mostly – correct. He hadn’t anticipated the genuine need in Abdul’s grip, the complete lack of passivity; the strength of him, or how peaceful it felt to be the recipient of an idle and yet purposeful touch of which he was the chosen object, to enjoy the drowsy planing of palms across his skin.

Most shocking of all – though it broke Thomas’s heart in places, to realize that what he had cherished had been, in some ways, only doing him harm – Abdul noticed what David had noticed, and never for a second, even unconsciously, used it against him.

When he reciprocated, with his breath ghosting along the inside of Thomas’s wrist, when he kissed along life and love lines and took the tip of Thomas’s index finger into his mouth, it shattered Thomas’s world a little to think that his own body could be the recipient of his own desires.

Things changed, of course, over their many years together; the process of discovery, Thomas realized over time, was never finished, whether it came to the modern world or to a relationship or a sexual life. He held onto this as a constant, though, and worried, though he told himself he was selfish for feeling such, when it was threatened. It was worrying, for example, just before Thomas first met Peter Grant, when he came home to the Folly after a police callout and found Molly and Abdul in the kitchen; she was steadily pouring cold water into a bowl full of ice cubes, and Abdul sighed and winced as he put his hands into it. Catching sight of Thomas at the doorway, he’d half-smiled, and said something about an ache, and not to worry, it had just been a long day. Too much typing, too many student papers to mark, and he would be more careful.

A year or so after Peter’s arrival, Thomas found himself standing in silence over Abdul in his – their, he corrected himself – bedroom, caught and held fast by the sight of Abdul half-asleep, having left his fingers tangled up next to his pillow in his pair of recently-acquired reading glasses. He didn't really know what had stopped him short, but it seemed Abdul, as he sensed Thomas above him and blinked his way awake, did, because he just reached out his other hand and gave it to Thomas, and reassured him that everything was alright.

He remembered how growing old had felt, and, thirty-five years on, didn’t miss it. To see it inflicted on anyone else pained him, he realized, in ways he was only just beginning to understand.

“It’s just as well you’ve got some new blood in,” Abdul told him one evening, when Peter and Lesley and Sahra Guleed were shouting (and Molly was hissing) at the television in the coach house – something about how on earth someone could have been so stupid as to use salt instead of sugar – and he and Abdul had been left to the quiet of the atrium and their tea. “They’ll keep you lively.”

“You’re doing your best to add to the chaos, never fear,” Thomas said dryly, giving Abdul a sideways look of disapproval. “Peter will be engrossed in that data on ESP for days. He’s got a job to do, you know, besides indulging your pet projects.”

“Privileges of the senior set,” Abdul smiled. “Corrupting the young.”

Thomas knew Abdul would catch the twinge of discomfort in his face; he always caught it, though he never quite stopped pushing the issue, either, and Thomas knew it was supposed to be for his own good, this accounting with the world of mortality he had left behind himself. And Abdul always apologized for it, too, apologized like he was doing now, sliding one of the hands Thomas loved so much into Thomas’s hair, warmed from his cup, and just resting there.

He took the calming influence of it gladly, and knew he would never forget it. His memory would not fail him in this respect, could not. And he wouldn’t let it, either.

*

**Author's Note:**

>  ~~No this piece doesn't say anything about me why would you even ask.~~ I didn't quite anticipate making David that awful, but that's how it fell out, I'm afraid. Title from James Thomson's _A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton_ (1727); thanks for reading, and I'm still taking prompts!
> 
>  **A/N:** in other news, I was pretty excited to finally settle, quite by accident, on Ben Daniels as the perfect facecast for my Walid this past week. I was so chuffed, in fact, that I put together a little Walid-centric gifset for the series which you can see [here at my Tumblr](http://akathecentimetre.tumblr.com/post/168143158871/rivers-of-london-fancast-the-gentlemans-agreement). (Seriously, it was actually a little spooky how much I was able to pull from _Law and Order: UK_ that fit with the various fics/with RoL canon in general. If you haven't seen it, Iain Glen threatening Daniels' character in 1x04 is really fucked up and creepy... Glen would make the perfect Faceless Man, imho.)


End file.
